The Blog of International Judicial Assistance | By Ted Folkman of Pierce Bainbridge

Posts tagged “MLAT”

The High Court in Northern Ireland has denied Anthony McIntyre’s motion for an injunction regarding the use of his Belfast Project interview. The Belfast Project case was the first case to which I devoted extended attention at Letters Blogatory. It’s been a while, so let me set the scene a bit. The First Case Ed Moloney was the director of the Belfast Project, an oral history project at Boston College that aimed to collect oral histories from participants in “the Troubles,” the conflict between Catholics and Protestants, loyalists and republicans, in Northern Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century. One of his researchers was Anthony McIntyre, himself a former member of the IRA who served time for murder in a British prison.…

The case of the day is United States v. McLellan (D. Mass. 2018). Ross McLellan was charged with conspiracy, securities fraud, and wire fraud. He sought an order to compel the government to exercise rights under the US/Netherlands MLAT so that he could obtain the testimony of a Dutch citizen for trial. He sought similar orders to compel the government to seek evidence for his use under the US/UK MLAT. In the alternative, he sought to exclude evidence related to the transactions on which he was seeking information at trial.

Readers, you will want to keep an eye on In re Application of Zayn Al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn (Abu Zabaydah), a really interesting § 1782 application pending in the Eastern District of Washington. Abu Zabaydah was a key figure in the government’s pre- and post-9/11 efforts to fight Al Qaeda. I’m not going to detail the whole sordid history of the case, but from what I’ve read it seems that Abu Zabaydah was a jihadi and an enemy of the United States, and that our government, which captured him in Pakistan in 2002, brutally tortured him and has no intention of either releasing him from custody or charging him with any crime. Senator Feinstein, on the Senate floor, said that for more than two weeks…